Press Release

Download the press release here.

THE CHINA PRICE
The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage
Alexandra Harney

“Essential reading for anyone concerned about how dangerous pet food and children’s clothing manufactured in China make it into American stores . . .  Financial Times reporter Harney paints a vivid portrait of factory life in the country that sells consumer goods for the lowest price possible.” —«Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“[An] engrossing tale of Dickensian industrialization . . . Packed with facts, figures and sympathetic portraits of Chinese workers and managers, Harney’s is a perceptive take on the world’s workshop.” —Publishers Weekly

With the recent scandals involving tainted food and toys from China, and mounting concern over the ever-growing pollution produced by Chinese industry, it’s clear that what happens in China does not stay in China:  It has a tangible, and at times devastating, global effect.  With THE CHINA PRICE:  The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage (The Penguin Press; Publication Date: March 31, 2008; $25.95; ISBN: 978-1-59420-157-8) veteran foreign correspondent Alexandra Harney has written a landmark exposé of how China’s factory economy competes for Western business by selling out its workers, its future, and the environment.

Harney’s reporting coups in this new book are numerous and news-making.  Fluent in Chinese, she was able to get inside China’s vast ecosystem of export-oriented industry in a way no other western journalist has.  In an amazingly inhospitable environment, she was able to extract beautifully rendered human stories that put a face to China’s rapid economic growth. 

Among the book’s many eye-opening revelations is the existence of the little known, but vitally significant, parallel system of factories that operate in China today — the “five star” facilities that get inspected and audited by foreign buyers, and the “black” unlicensed, uninspected factories that make some of the products that end up on our shelves.

In a journalist coup for a foreign reporter, Harney takes readers on a trip inside one of these rogue factories with its nervous owner, and skillfully uncover the rationale behind the off-the-books system. Basically, everybody in the system demands it:  The workers want more hours so they can send back more money to their home villages; the foreign buyers want the “China Price” — so low sometimes, and so unrealistic in terms of production capacity, that the only way to deliver it is through subterfuge; and though foreign buyers will rarely admit all this goes on, many plant owners want the system to continue because they, like every entrepreneur in China, are looking to get rich, tomorrow.

THE CHINA PRICE also impressively documents the towering costs of the “China Price” to the world’s largest manufacturing workforce — the Chinese themselves:  Horrendous health problems (the worst in the world per capita); the lack of safety inspectors; and the scandal of coal production in China — another parallel system of illegal mines that account for a stunning 70 percent of the entire world’s coal worker deaths.

The consequences of this system are clear:  Americans get cheap goods, but at a price, to ourselves, and to China. But Harney warns that all of this cannot last. The era of ultra-cheap prices for Chinese consumer goods is ending. The cost of labor, raw materials, and land is rising, driving factories deeper into the Chinese heartland and pushing up the price of Chinese exports. Disgruntled workers – many of them born under China’s one child policy – are standing up for their rights and challenging factory bosses, forcing the government to introduce the most sweeping overhaul of China’s labor laws in more than a decade.

Bold, revelatory, and an important work of investigative journalism, THE CHINA PRICE is essential reading if we are to understand the challenges facing China and the world in the decades to come. 

For more information or to schedule an interview with the author, please contact Liz Calamari at Penguin Press on +1 212 366 2857 or email her here. Click here to go to The China Price blog.